we acquire the imperfect knowledge which is to fit us for being men; but to the very last we may be truly said to believe far more than we know.  ‘Indeed,’ said Butler, ’the unsatisfactory nature of the evidence with which we are obliged to take up in the daily course of life, is scarce to be expected.’  Nay, in an intelligible sense, even the ’primary truths,’ or ‘first principles,’ or ‘fundamental laws of thought,’ or ‘self-evident maxims,’ or ‘intuitions,’ or by whatever other names philosophers have been pleased to designate them, which, in a special sense, are the very province of reason, as contra-distinguished from ‘reasoning’ or logical deduction, may be said almost as truly to depend on faith as on reason for their reception.* For the only ground for believing them true is that man cannot help so believing them!  The same may be said of that great fact, without which the whole world would be at a stand-still—­a belief in the uniformity of the phenomena of external nature; that the same sun, for example, which rose yesterday and to-day, will rise again tomorrow.  That this cannot be demonstrated, is admitted on all hands; and that it is not absolutely proved from experience is evident, both from the fact that the uniformity supposed is only accepted as partially and transiently true; the great bulk of mankind, even while they so confidently act upon that uniformity, rejecting the idea of its being an eternal uniformity.  Every theist believes that the order of the universe once began to be; and every Christian and most other men, believe that it will also one day cease to be.

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* Common language seems to indicate this:  Since we call that disposition of mind which leads some men to deny the above fundamental truths (or affect to deny them), not by a word which indicates the opposite of reason, but the opposite of faith,—­Scepticism, Unbelief, Incredulity. ____

But perhaps the most striking example of the helplessness to which man is soon reduced if he relies upon his reason alone, is The spectacle of the issue of his investigations into that which one would imagine he must know most intimately, if he knows anything; and that is, his own nature—­his own mind.  There is something, to one who reflects long enough upon it, inexpressibly whimsical in the questions which the mind is for ever putting to itself respecting itself; and to which the said mind returns from its dark caverns only an echo.  We are apt, when we speculate about the mind, to forget for the moment, that it is at once the querist and the oracle:  and to regard it as something out of itself, like a mineral in the hands of the analytic chemist.  We cannot fully enter into the absurdities of its condition, except by remembering that it is our own wise selves who so grotesquely bewilder us.  The mind, on such occasions, takes itself (if we may so speak) into its own hands, turns itself about itself, listens to the echo of its own voice, and is obliged,